Utah FORGE Chooses 17 Selectees to Begin Negotiations

The Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) at the University of Utah is pleased to announce it has chosen 17 project selectee applications for negotiations for the FORGE Solicitation 2020-1. The selectees could receive a combined total of up to $46M over the next 3 years.

“There is enormous untapped potential for enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) to provide clean and reliable electricity generation throughout the United States,” said Kathleen Hogan, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. “These investments in EGS research support President Biden’s mission to take on the climate crisis by pushing the frontiers of science and engineering and creating jobs in cutting-edge clean energy fields.”

Utah FORGE is a dedicated underground field laboratory sponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office. It is working on developing, testing, and accelerating breakthroughs in EGS. Solicitation 2020-1 was the first formal call for research proposals on EGS technologies from the Utah FORGE Program.  More information about Solicitation 2020-1 is available here.

“Utah FORGE looks forward to collaborating closely with the scientists and engineers of the project teams on technologies that will promote commercialization of this inexhaustible and non-polluting energy source,” said Joseph Moore, principal investigator of the project. “We were impressed with the caliber of all of the applicants who submitted proposals and anticipate additional solicitations in the future.”

The topic areas and the selectees include:

Title	Selectees
Devices suitable for sectional (zonal) isolation along both cased and open-hole wellbores under geothermal conditions	Welltec PetroQuip Energy Services Colorado School of Mines
Estimation of stress parameters	Battelle Memorial Institute Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory University of Oklahoma
Field-scale characterization of reservoir stimulation and evolution over time, including thermal, hydrological, mechanical, and chemical effects	Clemson University Stanford University Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Rice University
Stimulation and configuration of the well(s) at Utah FORGE	Fervo Energy Company University of Texas at Austin
Integrated Laboratory and Modeling studies of the interactions among thermal, hydrological, mechanical, and chemical processes	Pennsylvania State University Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory US Geological Survey University of Oklahoma Purdue University

 

About Utah FORGE

The FORGE site is located near the town of Milford in Beaver County, Utah, on the western flank of the Mineral Mountains. Near term goals are aimed at perfecting drilling, stimulation, injection-production, and subsurface imaging technologies required to establish and sustain continuous fluid flow and energy transfer from an EGS reservoir. For more information, please visit our website.